Standing on the Mountainside

I spent the past two days at Red Rocks taking in the inaugural Monolith Festival, and other than some sore legs, I’d call it a rousing success. The festival had five stages (the main Red Rocks stage plus four smaller areas), and over the course of two days, I saw 19 bands. Having been to a few festivals in my time, I was pretty impressed with the efficient timetable by which the bands’ sets were staggered (and the fact that everyone basically stuck to it), especially since this was the organizers’ first shot at this. Over the two days, I caught bits and pieces of a lot of performances, but here’s who I stayed to watch play more than one song:

FRIDAY
Everything Absent or Distorted
The Broken West
Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Das EFX
Kings of Leon
Editors
The Decemberists
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Cake

SATURDAY
Nina Storey
The Little Ones
Meese
Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s
Ian Ball (of Gomez)
Lords of the Underground
Art Brut
Spoon
The Flaming Lips

Whew. When I look at that list, it’s no wonder I’ve been so looking forward to chilling on the couch today.

After hearing so much about them, I was really looking forward to seeing the Lips, and they didn’t disappoint. They put on a great show (although I could have done with a little less speechifying from Wayne Coyne) with smoke, lasers, confetti, streamers, and dancing aliens and Santa Clauses, and were a great way to end the two days. Kings of Leon were definitely the highlight for me, but I was impressed by The Broken West and Ian Ball (who did some great covers and solo versions of Gomez songs), really happy to finally get to see Margot & TNSAS, and had my interest piqued enough that I’ll try to see Editors and BRMC in a different setting. It was also very cool to discover some great Denver-area bands (Everything Absent..., Meese, Cat-A-Tac, Nina Storey)—there’s a pretty solid music scene developing out here. Overall, this was a great festival experience, and hopefully, next year’s will be just as good. Parking was a breeze, it was easy to move between stages (as long as you don’t mind climbing stairs... lots of them), the food and merch was fairly reasonably priced (although they could use some more variety in the food department next year), the lineup of artists was solid, and of course the setting couldn’t be more amazing. I’m already looking forward to seeing next year’s announcement.

As a side note, I was really pleased to see woxy.com as a sponsor of Monolith. As I’ve said before, WOXY was the local college radio station in Oxford, OH (where I went to school) for many years, and turned me on to a lot of the music I still love today. Through a series of strange events, WOXY was forced to go internet-only, and has twice been snatched from the jaws of bankruptcy. I talked to one of their DJ’s, Shiv, about the happy fact that they’re still in business, and we reminisced about Oxford. Then he gave me a free t-shirt (rather appropriately, the graphic is a phoenix emerging from the ashes). Sweet.